Toomas Hendrik Ilves Quotes

As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I have made our nation's response to cyberwarfare a primary focus.

We take all potential threats to public and private sector systems seriously and will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.

The FBI is engaged in a myriad of efforts to combat cyber threats, from efforts focused on threat identification and sharing inside and outside of government, to our internal emphasis on developing and retaining new talent and changing the way we operate to evolve with the cyber threat.

Cybersecurity is a new issue for the international community at large. First of all, the technologies are new and the attacks are invisible. Traditionally, if you perceived a threat, it could be seen. It was physical. But not in cyberspace.

The sooner we act, the sooner we can start turning the tables on cyberattackers.

All of our intelligence agencies, our Department of Defense, are all working to meet this threat. But it's a fast moving world; it's a place where offense is easier than defense, and keeping up with the next innovation in cyber-warfare is an enormous challenge.

Encryption would help prevent a lot of cyber attacks.

Some of the greatest national security threats we face cannot be defeated or defended by traditional military hardware, but only by greatly enhanced cyberspace warfare, including both offensive cyber-warfare and cyber-security.

We live in a world where we're all on computers and tablets and phones, all the time, so something as odd as computer hacking or a virus is really scary because it gets to the heart of our security.

'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.

To prevent a crippling attack on our nation's critical networks, U.S. companies and the federal government must work together to combat those who wish to do us harm.

Our enemies and our would-be enemies are working very hard at cyberterrorism... They're trying to level the playing field because they know they can't beat us tank for tank, plane for plane.

There are two kinds of people in America today: those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and know it, and those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and don't know it.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, national security officials could not win top jobs without knowing the language of nukes. In contrast, today the vast majority of these officials are cyber-illiterate [when the current major threat was cyber-attacks].

The United States cannot wait for the cyber equivalent of the collapse of the World Trade Center.

I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.

We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe.

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone.

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

Effective cybersecurity policy will depend on active and continued collaboration between public and private sectors.

I think the thing that our government lacks - just about more than anything else - is technological competence. We have some of the greatest white-hat hackers in the world here in the U.S., but the government seems to be technologically illiterate.

Until defense of democracy in the digital era is taken up by governments collectively, both in NATO and outside the alliance, liberal democracies will remain vulnerable to the cyberthreats of the 21st century.

'Cyber-security' is one of those hot topics that has launched a thousand seminars and strategy papers without producing much in the way of policy.

CISPA permits, but does not require, entities that have been attacked to voluntarily share their knowledge of a cyber threat with each other and with government.

The biggest threat to the Internet is, frankly, always going to be complacency. I want to see more and more of us activated and people thinking of themselves as defenders of it.